A Child of the Jago, by Arthur Morrison

Preface to the Third Edition

I am glad to take this, the first available opportunity, to acknowledge the kindness with which
A Child of the Jago has been received: both by the reading public, from which I have received many gratifying
assurances that what I have tried to say has not altogether failed of its effect: and by the reviewers, the most of
whom have written in very indulgent terms.

I think indeed, that I am the more gratified by the fact that this reception has not been unanimous: because an
outcry and an opposition, even from an unimportant minority, are proofs that I have succeeded in saying, however
imperfectly, something that was worth being said. Under the conditions of life as we know it there is no truth worth
telling that will not interfere with some hearer’s comfort. Various objections have been made to A Child of the
Jago, and many of them had already been made to Tales of Mean Streets. And it has been the way of the
objectors as well as the way of many among the kindest of my critics, to call me a ‘realist.’ The word has been used
sometimes, it would seem, in praise; sometimes in mere indifference as one uses a phrase of convenient description;
sometimes by way of an irremediable reproach. It is natural, then, not merely that I should wish to examine certain
among the objections made to my work, but that I should feel some interest in the definition and description of a
realist. A matter never made clear to me.

Now it is a fact that I have never called myself a ‘realist,’ and I have never put forth any work as ‘realism.’ I
decline the labels of the schoolmen and the sophisters: being a simple writer of tales, who takes whatever means lie to
his hand to present life as he sees it; who insists on no process; and who refuses to be bound by any formula or
prescription prepared by the cataloguers and the pigeon-holers of literature.

So it happens that when those who use the word ‘realist’ use it with no unanimity of intent and with a loose,
inapprehensive application, it is not easy for me, who repudiate it altogether, to make a guess at its meaning.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the man who is called a ‘realist’ is one who, seeing things with his own eyes,
discards the conventions of the schools, and presents his matter in individual terms of art. For awhile the schoolmen
abuse him as a realist; and in twenty years’ time, if his work have life in it, he becomes a classic. Constable was
called a realist; so was Corot. Who calls these painters realists now? The history of Japanese art affords a continuous
illustration. From the day when Iwasa Matahei impudently arose and dared to take his subjects from the daily life of
the people, to the day when Hiroshigé, casting away the last rag of propriety, adventurously drew a cast shadow, in
flat defiance of all the canons of Tosa and Kano — in all this time, and through all the crowded history of the School
of Ukioyé, no artist bringing something of his own to his art but was damned for a realist. Even the classic Harunobu
did not escape. Look now at the work of these men, and the label seems grotesque enough. So it goes through the making
of all art. A man with the courage of his own vision interprets what he sees in fresh terms, and gives to things a new
reality and an immediate presence. The schoolmen peer with dulled eyes from amid the heap of precedents and
prescriptions about them, and, distracted by seeing a thing sanctioned neither by precedent nor by prescription, dub
the man realist, and rail against him for that his work fits none of their pigeon-holes. And from without the schools
many cry out and complain: for truth is strong meat, and the weakling stomach turns against it, except in minim doses
smothered in treacle. Thus we hear the feeble plea that the function of imagination is the distortion of fact: the
piteous demand that the artist should be shut up in a flower-garden, and forbidden to peep through the hedge into the
world. And they who know nothing of beauty, who are innately incapable of comprehending it, mistake it for mere
prettiness, and call aloud for comfits; and among them that cannot understand, such definitions of the aims of art are
bandied, as mean, if they mean anything, that art finds its most perfect expression in pink lollipops and gilt boxes.
But in the end the truth prevails, if it be well set forth; and the schoolmen, groaning in their infinite labour,
wearily write another prescription, admit another precedent, and make another pigeon-hole.

I have been asked, in print, if I think that there is no phase of life which the artist may not touch. Most
certainly I think this. More, I know it. It is the artist’s privilege to seek his material where he pleases, and it is
no man’s privilege to say him nay. If the community have left horrible places and horrible lives before his eyes, then
the fault is the community’s; and to picture these places and these lives becomes not merely his privilege, but his
duty. It was my fate to encounter a place in Shoreditch, where children were born and reared in circumstances which
gave them no reasonable chance of living decent lives: where they were born fore-damned to a criminal or semi-criminal
career. It was my experience to learn the ways of this place, to know its inhabitants, to talk with them, eat, drink,
and work with them. For the existence of this place, and for the evils it engendered, the community was, and is,
responsible; so that every member of the community was, and is, responsible in his degree. If I had been a rich man I
might have attempted to discharge my peculiar responsibility in one way; if I had been a statesman I might have tried
another. Being neither of these things, but a mere writer of fiction, I sought to do my duty by writing a tale wherein
I hoped to bring the conditions of this place within the apprehension of others. There are those who say that I should
have turned away my eyes and passed by on the other side: on the very respectable precedent of the priest and the
Levite in the parable.

Now, when the tale was written and published it was found, as I have said, to cause discomfort to some persons. It
is needless to say more of the schoolmen. Needless, too, to say much of the merely genteel: who were shocked to read of
low creatures, as Kiddo Cook and Pigeony Poll, and to find my pages nowhere illuminated by a marquis. Of such are they
who delight to read of two men in velvet and feathers perforating each other’s stomachs with swords; while Josh Perrott
and Billy Leary, punching each other’s heads, present a scene too sickening and brutal to consider without disgust. And
it was in defiance of the maunderings of such as these that Charles Lamb wrote much of his essay On the Genius and
Character of Hogarth. But chiefly this book of mine disturbed those who had done nothing, and preferred to do
nothing, by way of discharging their responsibility toward the Jago and the people in it. The consciousness of duty
neglected is discomforting, and personal comfort is the god of their kind. They firmly believe it to be the sole
function of art to minister to their personal comfort — as upholstery does. They find it comfortable to shirk
consideration of the fate of the Jago children, to shut their eyes to it, to say that all is well and the whole world
virtuous and happy. And this mental attitude they nickname optimism, and vaunt it — exult in it as a quality. So that
they cry out at the suggestion that it is no more than a selfish vice; and finding truth where they had looked for the
materials of another debauch of self-delusion, they moan aloud: they protest, and they demand as their sacred right
that the bitter cup be taken from before them. They have moaned and protested at A Child of the Jago, and,
craven and bewildered, any protest seemed good enough to them. And herein they have not wanted for allies among them
that sit in committee-rooms, and tinker. For your professed philanthropist, following his own spirit, and seeing
nothing, honestly resents the demonstration that his tinkering profits little. There is a story current in the East End
of London, of a distracted lady who, being assailed with a request for the loan of a saucepan, defended herself in
these words:—‘Tell yer mother I can’t lend ’er the saucepan, consekince o’ ’avin’ lent it to Mrs Brown, besides which
I’m a-usin’ of it meself, an’ moreover it’s gone to be mended, an’ what’s more I ain’t got one.’ In a like spirit of
lavish objection it has been proclaimed in a breath that I transgress:— because (1) I should not have written of the
Jago in all the nakedness of truth; (2) my description is not in the least like; (3) moreover, it is exaggerated; (4)
though it may be true, it is quite unnecessary, because the Jago was already quite familiar, and everybody knew all
about it; (5) the Jago houses have been pulled down; and (6) there never was any such place as the Jago at all.

To objections thus handsomely variegated it is not easy to reply with the tripping brevity wherewith they may be
stated; and truly it is little reply that they call for, except, perhaps, in so far as they may be taken to impugn the
sincerity of my work and the accuracy of my picture. A few of the objectors have caught up enough of their wits to
strive after a war in my own country. They take hold of my technical method, and accuse me of lack of ‘sympathy’; they
claim that if I write of the Jago I should do so ‘even weeping.’ Now, my technical method is my own, and is
deliberately designed to achieve a certain result, as is the method of every man — painter, poet, sculptor, or novelist
— who is not the slave and the plaything of his material. My tale is the tale of my characters, and I have learned
better than to thrust myself and my emotions between them and my reader. The cant of the charge stares all too plainly
from the face of it. It is not that these good people wish me to write ‘even weeping’: for how do they know whether I
weep or not? No: their wish is, not that I shall weep, but that I shall weep obscenely in the public gaze. In other
words, that I shall do their weeping for them, as a sort of emotional bedesman: that I shall make public parade of
sympathy in their behalf, so that they may keep their own sympathy for themselves, and win comfort from the belief that
they are eased of their just responsibility by vicarious snivelling.

But the protest, that my picture of the Jago is untrue, is another thing. For the most part it has found very vague
expression, but there are instances of rash excursion into definiteness. Certain passages have been denoted as
exaggerations — as impossibilities. Now, I must confess that, foreseeing such adventurous indiscretions, I had, for my
own diversion, set A Child of the Jago with traps. For certain years I have lived in the East End of London,
and have been, not an occasional visitor, but a familiar and equal friend in the house of the East–Ender in all his
degrees; for, though the steps between be smaller, there are more social degrees in the East End than ever in the West.
In this experience I have seen and I have heard things that persons sitting in committee-rooms would call diabolical
fable; nevertheless, I have seen them, and heard them. But it was none of my design to write of extreme instances:
typical facts were all I wanted; these, I knew, would be met — or shirked — with incredulity; so that, whenever I saw
reason to anticipate a charge of exaggeration — as for instance, in the matter of faction fighting — I made my typical
incident the cold transcript of a simple fact, an ordinary, easy-going fact, a fact notorious in the neighbourhood, and
capable of any amount of reasonable proof. If I touched my fact at all, it was to subdue it; that and no more. The
traps worked well. Not one definite charge of exaggeration has been flung but it has been aimed at one of the normal
facts I had provided as a target: not one. Sometimes the effect has had a humour of its own; as when a critic in a
literary journal, beginning by selecting two of my norms as instances of ‘palpable exaggeration,’ went on to assure me
that there was no need to describe such life as the life in the Jago, because it was already perfectly familiar to
everybody.

Luckily I need not vindicate my accuracy. That has been done for me publicly by independent and altogether
indisputable authority. In particular, the devoted vicar of the parish, which I have called the Jago, has testified
quite unreservedly to the truth of my presentation. Others also, with special knowledge, have done the same; and though
I refer to them, and am grateful for their support, it is with no prejudice to the validity of my own authority. For
not only have I lived in the East End of London (which one may do, and yet never see it) but observation is my
trade.

I have remarked in more than one place the expression of a foolish fancy that because the houses of the Old Jago
have been pulled down, the Jago difficulty has been cleared out of the way. That is far from being the case. The Jago,
as mere bricks and mortar, is gone. But the Jago in flesh and blood still lives, and is crowding into neighbourhoods
already densely over-populated.

In conclusion: the plan and the intention of my story made it requisite that, in telling it, I should largely adhere
to fact; and I did so. If I write other tales different in scope and design, I shall adhere to fact or neglect it as
may seem good to me: regardless of anybody’s classification as a realist, or as anything else. For though I have made a
suggestion, right or wrong, as to what a realist may be, whether I am one or not is no concern of mine; but the concern
(if it be anybody’s) of the tabulators and the watersifters.